It seems like only yesterday when Pat and I made our way home from Arizona to Minnesota for the summer months. “It’s always good to be home again,” we said at the time but now after three years of wintering down south in the same place, the same will be said when winter comes again and we head back to Maricopa. Whichever place we are at. It’s now home away from home.
When we arrived in Minnesota the trees were still bare and remnants of last winters ice and snow still lurked in the shadows. But in the roadside ditches and sunny hillsides, green grass was showing and down by the garden the rhubarb was emerging, poking its knurly red heads out of the black soil. The ice on the lake was all gray and cracked, days away from reverting back to a liquid and freeing the lake from winter’s icy cover. Yes, we were going to have another blessed summer. We had a carefully planed litany of events choreographed for our Minnesota summer we planed on living out on those summer days. There were weddings, meetings with old friends, concerts in the park and yes even unexpected funerals. Days basking in the sun at the beaches or rocking in the boat with a fishing rod in hand and nights with the grandkids, cuddled around a campfire. There were evenings on the deck watching the sun go down across the lake as it has done so many times before, only to welcome you the next morning, peeking over the eastern horizon.
Now as I write its late September and that summer we were so looking forward too is fast fading away. Somewhere in the back of my mind I hear Pete Seeger singing, “Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing. Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago.” Memorial Day, the fourth of July, the State Fair and Labor Day are in the past now too and so now we wait for Autumn. The days are growing shorter, and summer 2019 is on its way into history.
I try to think of all of the things I wanted to accomplish this summer and yes some of them got done and some of them were relegated to another time and another day, knowing full well at my age that another day and time is tenuous at best. Last spring I tore out another coupon from that book of life we all live with for one more summer and cashed it in. It’s a book that you can’t look ahead in, only back at and its pages, at least for me are becoming fewer and fewer. Some people can simply ignore the passing of life but that way of procrastinating can leave you with regrets someday that you didn’t do the things you wanted to do, when you could and life is so fickle it can all change in a hurry. I think when all is said and done, it will be the summers of my life that will be remembered as the fondest and maybe that’s why we follow the sun in the winter months, looking for that elusive eternal summer. Winter up north is a time of hardship for many with it’s cold dark nights, snow and ice and we feel blessed to escape its icy blast. Life goes on for those who can’t escape it and I hope that their days in the sun will come too. But as much as you look forward to leaving in the fall you also looking forward to returning in the spring, to a place where our creator did some of his best work and I’m betting it was a warm spring day when that idea struck him.
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